Canterbury
Canterbury is awesome. It's full of pubs & other things of lesser importance. The Join-Me pub of choice is 'The Cherry Tree'. But 'Simple Simons' is jolly good too. Booyah to the maxi tampon! Respect. Canterbury is one of the oldest cities in England, situated in North Kent on the river Stour. The Romans, under Julius Caesar's command, passed through the village in 55/54BC, and found the people to be quite civilised. They returned in 45AD, and this time Romanised the town, as the port provided links with both London and Gaul. When the Romans left the country to the invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes, the Roman town was abandoned and left in ruins for a century before new settlements started appearing, both within and without the Roman walls. According to the Venerable Bede, when Saint Augustine was sent to Britain by Pope Gregory to preach Christianity to the British pagans, he landed on the isle of Thanet in AD 597, where Ethelbert, King of the Angles and married to a Frankish Christian, met him and offered a house in his capital city of Canterbury, as well as granting the use of his wife's little parish church of St Martins to preach to whoever he chose, and to baptise any who wished to convert. The King was later to be baptised himself. Augustine was to be the first Archbishop of Canterbury, although it was Ethelbert's son who founded the monastry in 602AD that was to later become Canterbury Cathedral. A fire in 1067 (presumably unrelated to the Norman invasion as the city surrendered to William the Conqueror without struggle) destroyed the wooden structure, and the Normans set about rebuilding the building in stone, and fortifying the city. Canterbury has remained the capital of British Christianity for the intervening 1,400 years. Chaucer's Catholic Pilgrims travelled to the city in the Canterbury Tales, the reluctant Archbishop Thomas a'Beckett was murdered on the Cathdral's steps at the behest of Henry II in the 12 century, and the city was to become the world-centre of Anglicanism under Henry VIII in the 16 century. Perhaps Canterbury's most famous son - with apologies to misguided fans of Orlando Bloom - is the playwright Christopher Marlowe, the contemporary and literary competitor to Shakespeare, who is thought to have been recruited into Walsingham's spy-network while at Cambridge University, and to have carried out espionage in Europe in between writing such masterpieces as Dr Faustus. He was killed in an Inn in Deptford after a day in which he'd been meeting a number of men also thought to be involved in espionage activity, although his stabbing was allegedly over an argument over the bill. The fact that his death occurred just as Shakespeare hit his stride has been used more recently (mostly by people who have attended Cambridge University) to suggest that the death was staged and Marlowe was Shakespeare's guiding hand - if not actually Shakespeare himself. The evidence would however indicate that however suspicious the death itself was, the literary timing was almost certainly coincidental.